Re: CVE id assignment dates

["Steven M. Christey" <coley () rcf-smtp mitre org>]

On Mon, 23 Jan 2012, Michael Gilbert wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 3:04 PM, Steven M. Christey wrote:
> > We do not publish any dates related to disclosure, patch, or vendor
> > notification; interested parties can consult other databases that explicitly
> > track this information, such as OSVDB.
>
> Just curious, why not?  It seems like this kind of information would
> be invaluable for researchers interested anthropological/statistical
> studies of security vulnerabilities.

Despite public perception, CVE is *not* a vulnerability database (although 
the National Vulnerability Database [NVD], which extends CVE, *is*).  For 
CVE, our primary role has always been to provide standard vulnerability 
identifiers that everybody can use, so our analysis is focused on that 
particular task, which keeps us busy enough :-)  Tracking 
disclosure-related information is outside the scope of our project (and 
finding this information can take more time than you'd expect).  We use an 
imprecise notion of disclosure date so we can determine which year to 
place in the CVE-YYYY-nnnn identifier, but that's it.

I completely agree that tracking this kind of information is important, 
and I've personally wanted to see disclosure-related stats for years.  I 
specifically mentioned OSVDB because they are trying to track this 
information at a greater level of detail than any other effort I know of. 
And, by virtue of being an *open source* vulnerability database, others 
can contribute to it.

- Steve